Pope (sort of) blesses farm forum

Attendees at a Brussels industry event last week appeared to receive a message from a noteworthy luminary.

The audience of agriculture industry executives, senior European officials and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan were shown what looked like a custom-made recorded video address by Pope Francis.

“The earth is not an inheritance we have received from our parents, but a loan given to us for our children,” the pontiff said in the video played at the Forum for the Future of Agriculture (FFA) in Brussels, which was billed as “where agriculture and environment meet.”

The Pope’s message, which lasted for a little more than three minutes, wowed the hundreds present in the auditorium at the Square, a modern conference space located close by the iconic Grand Place in downtown Brussels. Some expressed their astonishment that the Pope had lent his voice to the event.

His appearance wasn’t quite what it seemed.

The message, produced by an Argentine communications agency, was a mash-up of old images from Vatican TV and a previous speech delivered in Spanish, with his words sometimes accompanied by footage of industrial farming, including a tractor spraying crops and combine harvesters in massive monoculture wheat fields.

That it was not an official message was not so clear to members of the audience, who were shown a video entitled “FFA 2017 Address From His Holiness The Pope.”

Vatican Press Office Director Greg Burke told POLITICO the broadcast wasn’t approved for the meeting. Nor, he added, did the pontiff record a video especially for the event. He pointed to the Pope’s official message on agriculture, which asks for prayers and just compensation for small farmers.

Since becoming head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has warned humanity to change its economic models to protect the earth.

Environmental and anti-business activists pounced. Martin Pigeon, a campaigner for Corporate Europe Observatory, an NGO seeking to expose lobbying activities in the EU, said the FFA’s organizers — Swiss agrichemical business Syngenta and the European Landowners’ Organization (ELO) — manipulated the Pope’s views in an “unprecedented scam.”

The NGO’s principal complaint is that the Pope’s message was accompanied by images of large-scale industrial farming, running counter to the Pope’s own messaging as primarily a defender of smaller farms.

Since becoming head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has warned humanity to change its economic models to protect the earth. In a recent encyclical, the Pope said the planet “is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

He has expressed fears that chemical products used in cities and agricultural areas “can lead to bioaccumulation in the organisms of the local population, even when levels of toxins in those places are low.” He also complained in the encyclical that agrichemicals sometime backfire by killing birds and insects valuable to farming.

The FFA requested a message from the Pope at the event. The Holy See, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, often participates in this kind of event “because they offer an opportunity to spread a message that might not otherwise be heard,” Burke said.

While the Vatican agreed to deliver its message in the form of a letter from Cardinal Pietro Parolin to FFA President Janez Potočnik, it was not aware of the video.(POLITICO was a media partner for the FFA event.)

As Corporate Europe Observatory noted, the Pope’s words in the video vary from the Vatican’s message in the letter. The letter, read aloud by Monsignor Alain Paul Lebeaupin at the FFA, echoed the Pope’s official message on agriculture.

“Every effort should be directed primarily to helping each country increase its own resources in order to achieve alimentary self-sufficiency,” it reads. “This will involve contemplating new models of development and consumption, facilitating forms of community structures that value small producers and that protect local ecosystems and biodiversity.”

The future of agriculture does not necessarily “mean viewing agricultural work on the basis of laboratory findings,” the cardinal’s letter said. “Those approaches may bring immediate benefits to some, yet have we adequately considered the harm they can do to others?”

Syngenta and ELO said they had nothing to do with the video’s content. Anne Marchadier, director of business development and finance for the ELO, said the official Vatican message to the FFA was represented in Cardinal Parolin’s letter.

Anna Bakola, head of external communications for Syngenta, said there was “no issue” surrounding the way the Vatican’s views had been presented during the FFA conference.

“There was FFA liaison with the Vatican, which was represented in person at the event by His Excellency Monsignor Alain Paul Lebeaupin, who delivered a specific address alongside the more general Vatican messaging on agriculture contained in the video,” Bakola said.

Juan della Torre, chief executive of La Machi, said his agency produced the video after a request from the ELO to produce a video summarizing the Pope’s general views on global agriculture. He said that his firm had been compensated for its work but declined to reveal the fee.

Asked about the images of large monocultures and pesticides, della Torre said the images were not supposed to promote large-scale farming or the use of chemicals. In a telephone interview from Buenos Aires, he said the images show “just regular, standard agriculture” and said the views of CEO were an “opinion” but did not overall represent “the truth.”

“I was very happy that all the leaders of the industry joined to talk about the environment,” della Torre said, adding that the ELO had no editorial say in the video’s production.

The ad executive said the Vatican authorized him to use footage from its television service for an FFA video, a claim corroborated by a letter signed by Frédéric Fornos, international director of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network.The final version of the video, however, was not formally approved, the Vatican confirmed.